George Orwell is one of the most famous writers of the twentieth century. I didn’t know until today that his given name was Eric Arthur Blair. He was born in India in 1903 while his father was in the service. The following year, his mother returned to England with him.

He adopted George Orwell as his pen name and created six rules for writing. As soon as you read them, you’ll see they’re great for creating crisp, clean prose.

BritainUnlimited

George Orwell’s Rules for Writing

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

If Orwell had been my writing coach, I imagine he would’ve cried in despair! Or at least doubled his coaching rate. But his rules give me something to aspire to.

Friedrich Nietzsche, the dark philosopher, also had rules for writing, but they are less practical.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s Rules for Writing

1. Of prime necessity is life: a style should live.
2. Style should be suited to the specific person with whom you wish to communicate. (The law of mutual relation.)
3. First, one must determine precisely “what-and-what do I wish to say and present,” before you may write. Writing must be mimicry.
4. Since the writer lacks many of the speaker’s means, he must in general have for his model a very expressive kind of presentation of necessity, the written copy will appear much paler.
5. The richness of life reveals itself through a richness of gestures. One must learn to feel everything — the length and retarding of sentences, interpunctuations, the choice of words, the pausing, the sequence of arguments — like gestures.
6. Be careful with periods! Only those people who also have long duration of breath while speaking are entitled to periods. With most people, the period is a matter of affectation.
7. Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.
8. The more abstract a truth which one wishes to teach, the more one must first entice the senses.
9. Strategy on the part of the good writer of prose consists of choosing his means for stepping close to poetry but never stepping into it.
10. It is not good manners or clever to deprive one’s reader of the most obvious objections. It is very good manners and very clever to leave it to one’s reader alone to pronounce the ultimate quintessence of our wisdom.

I bet Orwell would have hated Nietzsche’s rules for writing! They aren’t that helpful to me either but I admire what an astute critic Nietzsche was. He could tell when people used jargon or academic terminology to discourage people from engaging with and challenging their ideas. He once said, “They muddy the waters to make it seem deep.” Brilliant! We discussed Nietzsche’s life in a post a while back.

Yikes. I only brought up Nietzsche because I was planning to share a quote that showed what a terrifyingly intense writer he was. But after I wrote the majority of this post, I discovered the quote was actually by Franz Kafka! (This would not have happened to me if I had followed Nietzsche’s Rule #3. Oh well. C’est la vie! I’m breaking Orwell’s Rule #5 to keep it fair and square.)

Here is the Kafka quote: “What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ice-axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.”

All these rules seem to stem from the authors’ pet peeves, don’t they? I’m curious. Do you have any pet peeves when reading?